Adi Liraz is a multi and interdisciplinary artist and a curator. In her work she often bridges private and public experiences, discourses and spaces. She reflects on her personal and collective identity, particularly on her role in society as a...
NEWSHOUR ART BEAT: ‘We, as a people, still exist’ — artist illuminates Native American history with family photos
In 2009, artist Mercedes Dorame received a gift from her father — a CD filled with images of her family, some of whom she had never seen before. It was a new window into the history of her family, members of the Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe who had for generations been based in present-day Los Angeles and the surrounding area.
Shortly after she received those family photos, Dorame began to project those images onto different locations in her apartment and then photograph each composition. The result is “Living Proof,” a series of photos that brings her family’s history directly into her present-day environment.
Dorame, now based in Los Angeles, said the work is part of an effort to illuminate the survival of her tribe’s culture amid a historical legacy of violence toward Native Americans in the U.S., including land theft, kidnapping and forced assimilation. She said her grandparents rarely spoke of their heritage until later in life.
“It’s really hard to acknowledge the gaps in your own history,” Dorame said. “It’s hard to acknowledge that there are these kind of holes and places that you don’t know how to fill it in.”
Our bodies carry our personal and political histories. These histories reinscribe our internal and external world. Our actions in any social space are to a certain extent guided and shaped by these…
NOMEN Lab #4 The Fluid Body on an Uneven Political Ground
Our bodies carry our personal and political histories. These histories reinscribe our internal and external world. Our actions in any social space are to a certain extent guided and shaped by these scripts. Sometimes, to such an extent that we reproduce our ancestral past without any conscious awareness. Who are we to judge, decide, chose in life, when we do not always understand in what kind of political time we were born into, and what kind of personal desires it already produced and destroyed? Who are we then as descendants of those who have not fought their last battle? Is it possible to have an inward gaze and be able to separate what is ours and what is not? What good is it to do that?
“The colonial gaze is shaping my body in two ways. By doing so it re-inscribes an older unfinished history of persecution and saving life into my corporeal presence. First, the colonial gaze defines my body as privileged, desired, and hierarchized in relation to other bodies that it deems abject. In the second way, my body is a fetishized token standing for the afterlife of a 6 million dead. In both ways, my body is used as a tool of oppression. Yet, my body is located in a space where it should not be living, but rather be commemorated as death, its existence in this space is an act of resistance to the German politics of memory and to the Zionist project of a homogeneous Jewish homeland.
As such, my body contains many moments of a past that are mine personally and it is shaped by the genocidal brutality that is supposedly humanity’s responsibility.” Adi Liraz
Through a four-chapter-performance, Adi Liraz will re-create a process of embodying history/ies and being alive as shaped and shifted by the colonial gaze of German and Israeli nationalisms.
By creating an organic space made out of those experiences Liraz produces new channels to share those experiences collectively. The interactive performance aims to create a temporarily set counter-public and community. How we act upon this and in this will define how we can have an empowered space of belonging. In the second part of the lab, we will reflect verbally and collectively on what we have produced. What good did it do for us and as a form of political action?
Since we would like to keep an intimate atmosphere and the space cannot contain more than 25 people, we ask all interested to register to the following address until Sunday, December 18th: [email protected]. Please introduce yourself briefly alongside with your registration.
Tuesday, December 20th 2016, from 7 – 9:30 pm at Bilgisaray, Oranienstraße 194, Berlin Kreuzberg
(please press on the link above to learn more about the NOMEN Collective and the lab series)
My dress is full with knots, reattaching, reconnecting, re-weaving and respecting different stories and histories into one living organ. Today is Yom Kipur, by the Jewish religion, a day to rethink the passing year, recognizing our journey and our mistakes, asking for forgiveness and being ready to forgive and accept.
I hope we can all be better friends to each other, learn about real solidarity and provide a community when needed.
I am very thankful for all the good friends who have and still do accompany me in my journey and are there for me in hard moments, I ask for forgiveness from people and occasions I wasn't able to see and support, and I forgive those who truly acted without the intention to hurt.
Adi Liraz is a Berlin-based multi and interdisciplinary artist I’ve been friends with on Facebook for quite some time. Recently, two specific works of her caught my eye. The first one was just arou…
I wish everybody a happy new year, a year of happiness and fulfillment, of true friendship and love, of acceptance of all the layers which make us who we are, and the possibility of seeing each other
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